Critics, and even the general public, have noted the absence of women in The Lord of the Rings, an absence so glaring that it could hardly be overlooked. Many feminist scholars have, as a result of ...this deficiency, denounced J.R.R. Tolkien, interpreting this lack of female characters as indicative of repressed misogyny. Others, however, have defended the author, pointing out that the female characters that do exist could be considered role models. This essay offers an alternative interpretation and contends that the absence of women in the novel, though potentially reducing its appeal to modern readers, reinforces one of its central motifs: the barrenness and infertility of Middle-earth. Overawed by Tolkien's landscape descriptions and the extent of his worldbuilding, readers have overlooked just how empty this world is, how rarely the Fellowship encounters settled districts or even lonely habitations. Replacing the farms, villages, and markets a reader would expect to encounter are vast stretches of wilderness and the ruins of forgotten nations. The almost total absence of women, of wives, daughters, sisters, and mothers, reinforces this sense of desolation, suggesting to the reader that Middle-earth has no future. The novel's few women actually contribute to this impression, for they are all, for different reasons, childless. Compared to the infertile and declining populations of elves, humans, and dwarves, Tolkien's orcs display a shocking and unnatural fecundity, reproducing-in a manner only hinted at-in enormous numbers. The novel's conclusion, which begins with Aragorn's long-desired wedding and ends with Sam's return to Rosie Cotton, generates a flurry of contented relationships, suggesting not misogyny on the author's part, but a veneration for sex, romance, and family life. That Frodo is unable to partake in any of these makes his sacrifice all the more poignant.
There is a broad stream of Christian interpretation of J.R.R. Tolkien's fiction, especially The Lord of the Rings, which views it as the intentionally, essentially Christian work of an intentionally, ...essentially Christian author. This reductive, exclusivist approach does not do justice to the complex, generative interactivity between Tolkien's faith, the faith of his readers (or lack thereof), and the text itself. Building on work by Veryln Flieger, Michael Drout, and Robin A. Reid, this paper interrogates how Christian Tolkien scholarship drafts Tolkien the human sub-creator to perform Foucault's author-function by suppressing his contradictions and painting a figure whose life and works speak with a single, authoritative voice. Then, drawing on progressive Christian and Jewish hermeneutics and Tolkien's own writings on intent and the freedom of the reader, it proposes a hermeneutics of Tolkienian inspiration that honors Tolkien's Roman Catholic foundations, the sub-creative integrity of his secondary world, and the religious diversity of the readers who draw such deep wells of meaning from it. In so doing, it intervenes in ongoing conflict in the field of Tolkien Studies and Tolkien fandom more broadly over diverse interpretations of his fiction and the control of Tolkienian meaning.
In spite of being written over three decades ago, Mills's posthumously published "Manifesto" not only anticipates but transcends the majority, if not the totality, of the scholarship on Tolkien, ...race, and racisms which has been published since 2003. Scholars in philosophy and related fields familiar with Mills's work will recognize that the essay was a "critical exploration of how a fictional racial hierarchy strikingly illuminates the ongoing influence of certain old racist ideas on our present day sic social realities." Reid has invited a wide-ranging Tolkienists who have read the essay to respond, briefly, on the significance of the essay to their work
The extracts in Sweet's little primer, given the difficulty of obtaining White and Holt's, may have been used as passages for exam purposes and therefore used by the students, but would not have ...satisfied the needs of a professor of English philology interested in, lecturing on, and supervising a D. Phil. thesis about the Ormulum. Moreover, the extracts in Sweet's edition are based on White and Holt's (vi), which currently remains the most modern and complete volume. This provides a further reason for Tolkien to own the source text indicated above and for Christopher to have made use of it in his own teaching whilst holding a position as a tutor, as it was a set text in ME language for many years. It is probable that Tolkien owned White's previous edition published in 1852 in order to compare White and Holt's with White's first attempt at editing the work, yet this is mere speculation and therefore not included in this article. Tolkien may have also found the work appealing because the Ormulum is the author's holograph and thus less affected by scribal corruption.
During the medieval and early modern periods, folkloric goblins were often presented as multifaceted creatures with unclear origins and as nebulous markers of the preternatural. Beginning in the ...1800s, however, authors crafted new interpretations of these creatures that appropriated folkloric traditions to create a distinct kind of fictional goblin. The works of George MacDonald (d. 1905) and J. R. R. Tolkien (d. 1973) were essential to this process. MacDonald's The Princess and the Goblin (1872) fuses folklore with Darwinian evolutionary thought to present goblins as antagonistic, troglodytic schemers who devolved from humans. MacDonald's ideas were influential on Tolkien, as he characterizes goblins as a corrupted and evil 'race'-descriptions that utilize racialized language common in early twentieth-century England. Tolkien and MacDonald thus flattened folkloric goblins in their own works such that they became an entirely different (and specific) kind of fictional monster that reflected contemporary trends in English society.
Porgeirrson examines the work of author J.R.R. Tolkien and the ethnography of the elves. The influence of Old Norse myth and legend on J. R. R. Tolkien's fictional works is well known. Less attention ...has been given to material from later Icelandic folklore as a source for Tolkien's world-building. The case of the elves, however, is worth considering. Here, the medieval sources are quite sparse. While there are many mentions of elves in the Eddic poems, they offer next to no concrete information on what sort of beings the elves might be. Later Icelandic folklore offers a far richer account of elves.
Esther Clinton (1971–2022) Orejuela, Fernando
The Journal of American folklore,
07/2023, Letnik:
136, Številka:
541
Journal Article
Recenzirano
After graduating with a doctorate in folklore and a minor in Old English and German Philology from IU, Esther juggled adjunct teaching positions at Indiana University Bloomington, Indiana ...University-Purdue University in Indianapolis, Bergen County Community College, Hudson County Community College, West Virginia State University, and Marshall University, until landing a long-term instructorship in the Department of Popular Culture at Bowling Green State University (BGSU) in Bowling Green, Ohio, where she further mastered her pedagogical skills. ...there is a metal folk group who listen to a subgenre referred to as “Tolkien metal”—a substyle of heavy metal music inspired by Tolkien's stories, with a style ranging from ambient electronica to the raucousness of black metal. Together with Nelson Varas-Díaz and Daniel Nevárez-Araújo, they edited the much-anticipated book about metal scenes in the Global South Defiant Sounds: Heavy Metal Music in the Global South, to be released in 2023—a work that promises to be transformative for both ethnomusicology and popular music studies.
Hearing the patient's voice Pasquini, Robert
CMAJ. Canadian Medical Association journal,
2020-Jan-06, 2020-01-06, 20200106, Letnik:
192, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
An interview with Dr Michael Schweitzer is presented. Schweitzer said that in medicine, you learn about balancing priorities. I always wanted to write a bigger story, but I never had the time with ...all the schooling. My practice has always been my priority. My head needs to be in the game, for my patients' sake. When it came to free time, if I had a choice about how to spend an afternoon, then sitting down and writing was something I was happy to do. There's some kind of humanizing effect behind storytelling that you learn as you write. It teaches you about other people and how to empathize with another person in other situations. In practice, I'm hearing the patient's voice, when they're telling the story. The dirty truth of writing fiction is that there are only so many stories to tell. Most stories have similar plots.
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